Live Writer continues as Open Live Writer

There was an announcement today that will bring cheer to bloggers who have used and cherished Windows Live Writer. The team at Microsoft has been allowed to take this marvelous blogging tool to the open source community where its development and support can live on.

Long live Open Live Writer!

The website for the new tool is http://openlivewriter.org/. Download the initial version 0.5. It looks, feels, and works just like Windows Live Writer. There are some things that had to be left out. But the team will catch up and keep this the finest blogging tool bar none!

One more thing: This post was made entirely using the new Open Live Writer. It installed cleanly, downloaded the theme details from my blog, and worked smoothly. Even allowed me to put in the html code for the “boilerplate” on the bottom.

Great work OLW team! Continue on!!

Images In Posts – Sources and Methods

This is a revisit of this topic with updates and a look at how Live Writer works with the current versions of WordPress and Blogger.

Many new features have been implemented in the latest WordPress themes, and Blogger templates. Much is not supported by Live Writer since it has not been updated in the last three years, yet it still offers the best and easiest means of preparing blog posts. With higher resolution monitors and especially smart phones, tablets, and other devices, new questions arise on how to best deal with images.

Live Writer has a number of ways for inserting images. In Inserting a picture from your computer

this article the options will be covered in turn. Both the Home and the Insert tab provide an Insert – Picture option. There are four option in the drop-down menu:

From your computer…

From the web…

Create online album…

Add online album…

Inserting a picture from your computer

Most of the images that you wish to show in a blog post most likely start out on your computer. Live Writer allows you to scale the image so it will fit and be positioned the way you like. Three standard sizes are offered and those sizes can be set by you. The sizes are Small, Medium, and Large. There is actually a fourth size: Original. For this blog my sizes are set so that images fit nicely into the blog column.

Here the Large size is 640 pixels wide to take up the width of the column. The Medium size is 320 px so that two will fit side by side. The Small size is set to 200 px, allowing three across. Live Writer will prepare scaled images with the specified border and any additional features. The illustration above uses a white border and a watermark. Both of these features are done in Live Writer. The image that appears in the blog post is called a “thumbnail”, even though it might be rather large. Jumping ahead of the story a little: Click on the image above – the “source” image is actually smaller than the thumbnail her.

You do not need to prepare images to the desired size, Live Writer can do the scaling. However, there is something else to consider. An image in the post can link to something else. By default that is to the same picture, normally a larger version. On the Picture Tools tab (reached by clicking the image in Live Writer) you can set where the link goes to.

If you choose Link to: Source picture, when the visitor clicks the image the browser will show the “source” version. Most browser show it on a blank, white page, positioned in the upper left. That is not the prettiest way of doing it, but might be what you like.

You can specify the size of this source picture that will be shown on the blank page with the Link options setting. Clicking that option brings up a little dialog as shown here. There are again four size options, the Small, Medium, Large, and Original sizes. The standard sizes are the same as the sizes for the thumbnails. The Original size, however, will be the actual size that the image is on your computer. Most modern digital cameras produce images way bigger than will fit conveniently into a browser window, even on the newer monitors or devices with their high resolution. That brings us back to the “however” above. You should scale your picture to a size that is appropriate. The image displayed by clicking the image link should show the picture better and larger, unlike the pots above. But you don’t want the source picture to overwhelm. For the past few years I have used “originals” that are 1024 px on the larger side. Those used to fill the browser nicely, but with the progress to higher resolution displays even in phones and small handheld devices, I have been using 2000 px lately. If you don’t link to another version of the image, of course, you need not worry about the original size as it will not be shown or uploaded.

Where to the images go?

Live Writer uploads the prepared “thumbnail” image and the “source” image, if used, to the blogging service. If you are using WordPress both images go into your Media library. This is a “flat” file, that is, it is not further divided, just a large shoe box full of pictures. If you are on Blogger, the images are uploaded to you Google album “Windows Live Writer”. NOTE: Blogger imposes a limit on the number of images uploaded for one post. You might run into that limit if you have a large number of photos. I did with a story on a car show last year, so I just split the post into two ( British Car Fayre 1 and British Car Fayre 2 ). Google storage rules are such that images smaller than about 2024 px are not charged to the space used.

Inserting pictures from the web

The second insert option in Live Writer is “From the web…”. This allows a wide range of sources, but assuming that you want images of your own that you have online, the range shrinks quite a bit. When you click From the web… a small dialog pops up. You need the web address, URL, of the image, not the page it might be on.

NOTE: Although it is easy to get an URL of most any image on the Internet, you can’t just grab it and insert it into your blog. Plagiarism applies to images as it does to text. Don’t steal, don’t borrow, don’t “quote”, unless you have permission from the owner of the image. Stick to your own.

Where to store and get images

The easiest web place to store your images is, of course, your blogging service. Live Writer can upload pictures to your blogging service, but sometimes it might be easier to upload them yourself directly and then retrieve the URLs.

WordPress

In your WordPress account Dashboard you have your Media Library. WordPress has made many improvements in this area. Uploading is easy and uses a drag-and-drop method. You can easily get the web address for images already in your WordPress Media Library, just go to the Media library, click on the image you want. The image URL is in one of the property boxes. You can also right-click the image and click Copy Image Location.

Blogger

If you have a Blogger blog, you have a Google account and, as noted above, your images uploaded by Live Writer are in the Windows Live Writer album. Don’t add images manually to that album. The most recent additions go to the end of the normal listing and that may mean a lot of scrolling to find what you want. You can use any other album for storing photos, of course, and you can get the URL for any of your Google photos and insert them into a post. Just be sure that your album is made public so your readers will be able to see the image. To get the image URL from your Google Photos, right-click the image, then click Copy image URL, it will be loaded into your clipboard. Since this method does not involve the upload limit for a blog post, you can insert any number of images into your post.

Flickr

Flicker is one of the oldest photo sharing services and has some very nice features. Unfortunately, being friendly to blogging is not one of them, they don’t want to provide the URLs to your own images. So don’t plan on sourcing photos from Flickr. You can link to your images and albums there, they show nicely and you can provide slide shows. But for inserting an image in the post, forget Flickr.

OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive, the former SkyDrive, is meant to be your file cabinet in the cloud. It is organized in folders and subfolders, so managing your images is really easy – just like on your desktop computer. Uploading is drag-and-drop. Getting to the URL is a matter of clicking on the image and then clicking View original. The image shows full size on a blank page and its URL is in the browser address field. Microsoft does a very good job of managing access to stuff in your OneDrive, so make sure that the folder is public.

Problems with images from the web

When you use pictures from the web, there are some concerns that you don’t need to address when using pictures from your computer option in Live Writer. An image on the web is stored in the size that was uploaded. As I mentioned above, for me that is nowadays 2000 px on the large side. When you use the Insert – From the web… procedure, Live Writer will insert the picture in whatever size it is. You can use the Size controls to get it to the size you like in the post. There is another “however” here. When someone looks at you blog post, the browser has to download the image and rescale it for display. That process is not as fast as downloading an image that is already the correct size. You blog post might not load as fast as you like and not as fast as it could if the images were the correct size already. If you use just a few images, that may not make a noticeable difference.

Create online album… – Add online album…

Live Writer has a delightful feature that it calls “online album”. A group of small thumbnails can be arrayed in different layouts as a representation of an entire album. Live Writer then uploads the entire album, or alternatively using an existing online album. Links are provided for seeing the pictures in the album. This feature goes back to the days even before SkyDrive. Live Writer used the Microsoft online storage service since its infancy and still works like a charm with OneDrive. However, it only works with OneDrive! There are some limitations that date back in time that have not been updated.

The dialog that comes up when Create online album… is selected allows you to drag pictures form your anywhere on your computer and combine them as one album.

The album is inserted when you click Insert and then you have a large array of options as to layout and other features.

When you publish the post with an album, the images in the album are uploaded to your OneDrive, into an folder in the root of the OneDrive called by the album name you specified. Other images that you inserted “from your computer” will go to your blogging service.

But wait, there is more!

You can move that “album” folder in your OneDrive to another location. All the links will be correctly preserved.

So these are the methods for inserting images into a blog post using Live Writer. I have pointed out some of the items that you must be careful with. In spite of the fact that Live Writer has not been updated in years, it still provides features and convenience unmatched by any other tool.

Photo Captions in Blogs

In the previous post here, Photo Captions in WordPress Blogs, the topic was the feature provided in the WordPress blogging service. Captions are a nice feature to explain the details of an image. There were questions about how to do captions for photos in Blogger blogs. This article takes up the subject and expands to Blogger blogs and blogs in general.

There is no native caption feature provided by Blogger, and there is no direct support in Live Writer. So, to do captions we do it the old-fashioned way and go back to using tables. That used to be very popular years ago when whole sites consisted of nothing but tables. That approach was cumbersome and is much despised and discouraged. However, it is a viable and relatively easy way to add captions to illustrations. Of course, it will work not just for Blogger blogs, but others as well. So it can be used on WordPress almost as readily as the feature.

Here are the details – using a table to caption a photo

The Table tool in Live Writer

In Live Writer the table option is on the Insert tab.

Before we go into the details let’s take a look at the problem we have set for ourselves. The need for “captioning a photo” assumes that the photo accompanies text and is set within that body of text, either to the left or the right. We likely do not want the outlines that are so common with tabular data. The table tool in Live Writer by default sets the table the width of the blog column and centers it with no text to either the right or left of it. Indeed, the tool does not offer an alignment option. We will have to do that the hard way.

The Live Writer Insert Table dialog

Clicking the Table tool brings up a small dialog to enter the details for the table. The dialog will look different for you the first time you use it and Live Writer will remember your settings for the next time.

For this use, captioning a photo, we need a table with just one row and one column.

The width is not critical at the outset as Live Writer will resize the table when you set the size of the photo once you have inserted it.

There is a check box for “Show table border” and a field for specifying the width of the border in pixels. For this application we don’t want a border. Unfortunately, Live Writer uses the style sheet set up for the blog theme or template and there may be some defaults that interfere with what we are trying to do. Uncheck the box, the field will be “grayed out” and no border width entry is required or possible.

Next come two other specifications, “Pad cell contents” and “Space between cells”. Both values are specified in pixels. These values are translated to HTML “cellpadding” and “cellspacing” attributes, respectively. Here again Live Writer may bow to the blog style sheet and be less than cooperative with you. Do remember that Microsoft has not seem fit to update this magnificent tool in the last few years.

We want some space between the blog text and the image, we will use the “Space between cells” value for that. A value of 10 should be fine. The “Pad cell contents” value specifies additional space within the cell, think of it as a margin setting. You would think that the two add to each other. They do. Yes, one or the other could be set to zero, but farther along in this article I will explain and added bonus feature, so go ahead and use 10 for this value also.

When you click Insert in the dialog you will see something like this on your screen:

The HTML code, as seem when you click the Source tab (lower left of Live Writer window) is like this:

We will need to add an attribute to this code to specify the alignment. You can do this at any time, but it is easiest to do it right away when the HTML code is at the end and easy to find. The attribute is align=”left” or align=”right” and needs to be added to the first line of the table HTML code. I like to add it just before the closing “>”. Live Writer will move it to where it likes it.

Move the cursor to the place in your post text where you want the image. Insert your table, click the Source tab. Find the table code. Move the cursor to the end of the “table” line but before the “>”. Type a space and then the align attribute. Obviously, if you want the picture on the left side, use align=”left” and if you want it along the right margin use align=”right”. Click the Edit tab to return to the normal display.

Click in the center space of the table. The cursor will be located inside the cell. I like to type my caption text before inserting the image, but it doesn’t matter. It works as you would expect. You can size the image as you normally do, the table size will be readjusted by Live Writer.

There is one thing I must caution you about: In Live Writer tables are not easy to move. It is easier to move the text that is around them.

Bonus

In elegant sites you may have admired photos not only being captioned, but also offset on a different color background. That is easy to do. First figure out the hex code for the color that you want for the background. Your theme or template may already set the blog on a colored background, so you want your “image highlight” to be a color that is close, a little darker if it is a light background or a little lighter if you blog is on a dark background. What I do is this: I do a screen capture of one of my blog posts, paste it into Paint and use the color picker to load the background color into the color selector. Then I adjust the color for the background I want, see the pointer in the illustration. The values for read, green and blue (see the arrow) are then translated into hex for the HTML code. For the values here, 255, 233, 191, you get FF, E9, and BF (I use the Calculator in Programmer view). The HTML attribute to set this color as the cell background is bgcolor=”ffe9bf”. This attribute goes into the “td” line. Again it doesn’t matter where you put it, Live Writer will relocate it. It is easiest, however, to put it right at the start. See the HTML code illustration here and also the result in the normal edit view.

The Eastern Continental Divide Monument in Duluth, Georgia. The location of this obelisk is at 34o 00’12.286”N 84o 08’ 43.245” W

Alright, let’s try it. Here is a little bit of art to illustrate photo captioning as well as setting a background color for the image. Once you try this technique it will soon become much easier that you now might think after this long dissertation. Note that for the caption all the text editing features are available.

Also note that the image not only can be sized as desired, you can also insert a hyperlink. In this case it takes you to my Café Ludwig OneDrive photo album.

The only negative is that there can be style sheet overrides, as I mentioned before, that are hard to get rid off. For this article I left it as it defaults. I also published this article at This ‘n That to demonstrate the difference that the basic WordPress theme can make.

Photo Captions in WordPress Blogs

While Windows Live Writer has been essentially orphaned for several years, blogging providers have made progress and refinements in many areas. WordPress blog posts can have captions below photos that can make a post attractive and professional looking. The WordPress online editor is, like pretty much all other blog editors, an awkward to use non-WYSIWYG contraption. The finished blog post, however, can be quite good looking. Can the new feature be inserted when using Live Writer? Indeed, it can be done. It is not particularly elegant, and the process requires some added steps. Before I get into the details, here is a captioned photo.

The car carrier Hoegh Delhi coming up the St. John’s River on its way to the port at Jacksonville, Florida

You can see that WordPress has added a frame background to the photo and the caption is in gray below the image.

The procedure for adding captions to photos

There are some constraints and gotchas, but the procedure in its most basic form is simple and straightforward.

WordPress supports this feature by specification text in square brackets. For the photo above the specification text is this:

The image is then inserted right after the first closing square bracket. It will then look like this:

Basically that is all it takes. The bracketed text ahead of the image tells the WordPress editor to insert the background field and caption. You do not need anything in the id attribute. The align attribute will be mangled by the WordPress editor, so it really doesn’t matter much what you put in. In the WordPress editor it will wind up as “alignnone”. More about this farther down. The width attribute specifies the field size. This should be the same as the the size of the image that you insert.

The text following the image is the text that you want to appear as the caption. You can apply some editing features, like bolding. Even forcing a line break in the caption will work. You do that with Shift-Enter. The end of the caption is specified by /caption in square brackets.

If you want your image either left or right justified with text alongside, that can be done. Prepare it just like above, but with the appropriate width specification and apply the normal image alignment and margin settings. You will need to do some editing in the WordPress online editor.

There are some additional steps needed. If you do as I explained and you publish the post, the caption may not be there. My procedure is to not publish it, but to “Post draft to blog”. Then log in to your WordPress Dashboard and edit the post. If you just click back and forth between Visual and Text view, the WordPress editor will do its magic. If you have left or right aligned images you need to take care them in the WordPress online editor. In Text mode you can just correct the align attribute to alignright or alignleft. Use the preview option, View Post, to make sure that everything got taken care of.

To see an example of a blog post with captioned photos take a look at my article Museum Photography 2 in my Café Ludwig blog. I intentionally allowed some of the images to “stick out” from their caption fields, just an added little feature that you might also want to experiment with. Hint: Use different width specifications for caption field and the image.

Windows Live Writer dates from ancient history by modern standards, it was born back in the days when Microsoft offered “Spaces”. That was a personal web site and blogging service. Live Writer offered a a WYSIWYG, “what you see is what you get”, interface to make preparing blog posts really easy and accessible to everyone. Images were stored on your Spaces site.

Spaces is long gone, the online storage became SkyDrive and changed name more recently to OneDrive. Live Writer is part of Windows Essentials and hasn’t been updated in two years. Still, Live Writer is the best blogging editor there is. Nothing else comes close.

Does Live Writer work with OneDrive?

Absolutely, and beautifully too! OneDrive, unlike other “cloud” photo storage services, is organized in folders and sub-folders just like the file storage system on computers. There have been many changes and improvements in OneDrive cloud storage but no matching updates to Live Writer, so it works as it did years ago. Some compromises are required and some new quirks have been introduced, but these you can live with. In the next section I will take a look at the various features and describe how they work nowadays – mid-year 2014.

To check the current operation, I prepared two blog posts to illustrate the features and problems. I first prepared and published the post on Gallery Ludwig. Here is a screen capture of the way it looks. I incorporated a number of the unique features that Live Writer offers for managing the appearance and layout of illustrations. After publication to Gallery Ludwig, a WordPress blog, I opened the post in Live Writer and selected another of my blogs, Café Ludwig, that is very different in layout, so I made scaling changes to fit the post into the narrower layout of that blog, and published it to Café Ludwig, a Blogger blog.

Picture Effects

Live Writer has some nice picture effects like tilting the image, applying frames and more. Most of these effects are only available when the image is sourced from the computer as you prepare the post. Specifically frames, tilting, watermarks, and picture effects require local photos. Live Writer adds these changes to a new copy of the image. This new image is uploaded to the blog site when the post is published. In fact Live Writer may upload two copies, a “thumbnail” and a “source picture”. If the blog is hosted by WordPress the images go to the Media Library. When hosted on Blogger the images are sent to your Google Photos album to an album by the name “Windows Live Writer”. The images in the post are the “thumbnails”. Live Writer will provide a hyperlink to the “source picture” if that is selected in the properties section.

My preference is to use the “Source picture” option very little, because the browser display it in just a plain, ugly view of the photo. I prefer to link to a photo in a OneDrive album, or folder. This gets us to sourcing from OneDrive.

Sourcing images from OneDrive

OneDrive has become an easy to operate online file storage system. Sourcing photos from a OneDrive album is best done by accessing it in a browser. The image must have sharing set to “Everyone”, that is public. This is best done by having the containing folder set to public sharing. When the photo is displayed in OneDrive the URL in the browser address bar provides a link to that page.

The illustration above shows the URL selected to be copied (Ctrl+C) so it is available for use in Live Writer.

To link a picture that was sourced from the computer, click on the picture, then click Insert > Hyperlink. The copied URL will already be in the dialog.

If special features on the image are not needed, it is easy to source the image right from OneDrive. This way Live Writer will not need to upload the photo to the blog site. For this approach click “View original” when the photo is viewed (see the illustration above). This shows the photo by itself. The URL may now be copied from the browser address bar.

In the post draft in Live Writer select Insert > Picture – From the web. Then paste the URL into the dialog. Click Insert. Then you can position the image, resize, set the margins on the Picture Tools ribbon (click the picture to bring up this ribbon).

You can arrange the layout as you like. Remember that you downloaded the blog layout settings when you added the blog account to Live Writer.

One of the beautiful features of Live Writer is the ability to add a collage of photos from an OneDrive album.

Adding a collage from a OneDrive album

Live Writer can prepare a collage right from the pictures in a OneDrive album. There is one important catch: The album must not be a sub-folder. It has been this way from the earliest days of Live Writer, so this is nothing new. If you are newly uploading the photos to your OneDrive, just make sure you do it in a newly created folder right on the first page. Make that folder public. If you already have an album that you wish to use, move it to the first page. After you have prepared the post in Live Writer you can move your album to any folder or subfolder as you wish. Don’t worry about breaking links – none will be broken. That is part of the charm of OneDrive!

Time and “improvements” in OneDrive have made the links that are on the collages operate not as expected, but close. The “VIEW SLIDE SHOW” link just gets you to the OneDrive album. You don’t get a “Play slide show” option until you click one of the pictures. The links of the individual square thumbnails get you to the “View original” display of the full sized image in a plain browser window. This, by the way, is lost in the translation to another blog. You can check that in the Café Ludwig post. Guess that is asking just a bit too much of Live Writer.

So as you can see, OneDrive and Live Writer work very nicely together. That you can move folders around in OneDrive without breaking any links is a really nice feature. After preparing the first post with the two collages I moved the folder from the main page to a sub-folder. As you can easily ascertain, the links work fine.

Microsoft Windows Live Writer is the unsurpassed blogging editor. For WordPress blogs it handles pages as easily as normal posts. Live Writer can also be used to generate the HTML code needed for use in setting up sidebar features.

This article explains the technique and procedure for doing so. Here is an image of a sidebar with multiple features, a map, some images and text with hyperlinks. Things that are easily inserted with Live Writer into posts. It works just as easily for use with the WordPress sidebar Text Widget. There are a few peculiarities that have to be carefully observed.

WordPress Text Widgets are used for arbitrary text or HTML. It is the HTML handling that makes them so powerful as most anything can be shown.

Live Writer can be used in its normal graphical interface, wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) to set up the HTML code.

Most sidebars are on the order of 250 pixels wide, it will help if you know the exact size of your sidebar. In Live Writer ignore the margins as they will be for your main area and not the sidebar. Since material in the sidebar will look best when centered, that is what you should use in preparation.

The main caution concerns images. They must be sourced from the web. Since you will not publish this post, Live Writer will not upload the images. So you need to upload all images manually before you set up the sidebar HTML.

Prepare your images

Prepare your images in the exact size that you want them to appear and upload them to the WordPress Media Library. This is a drag-and-drop procedure so it is quite fast and straightforward.

Obtain the file URL for each image. Be sure to get the file URL and not the permalink. See the illustrations below. It might help to just copy the ULRs and paste them into Notepad so they are handy when you are ready to use them.

Create the sidebar HTML

Open Live Writer to a blank post – you can name the post anything, but something like “sidebar 1” might be descriptive enough. You will not upload this post, only save it on the local PC.

Enter the text normally, center the text. When you need an image use Insert > From the web … Enter the image file URL.

Continue and build your sidebar.

Note in the illustration above that the social media icons are not centered. If you want images beside each other set the Alignment to Left. Space them with the right or left margin setting so that the sum of the margins and image horizontal dimensions adds up to the width of the sidebar.

Inserting a map

Things get a little tricky when you insert a map. Live Writer lets you size the map image so you can fit it to the sidebar. However, that image is locally generated and stored. It is not uploaded to WordPress, since you will not publish this working post. So you must do a screen capture, clip out the map image, upload it to the WordPress Media Library just like any other image. But, and this is important, you can’t change the generated code to reference that image. Live Writer will overwrite it on every operation. You will need to make the change later.

When you are finished with the setup, click the Source tab (lower left). Select all the source text and copy it. You can store it on Notepad – a good place to make the correction for any map image.

In the illustration here the code is selected in the Source view of Live Writer on the right and inserted into the Text Widget in the WordPress dashboard on the left. If you have no corrections to make to the code this is the quick and easy way. If you need to make a correction for a map image here are some additional notes.

Making the image reference correction for a map

Live Writer will generate an image of the map. The reference in the code needs to be changed to a file URL from the Library.

Find the reference in the code. Look for the section that contains the words “map picture”. Find the text <img src=. Replace everything in the quotes that follow with the file URL. In the illustration the reference generated by Live Writer is partially highlighted. It begins with a dollar sign, $.

Once the correction is made just save the Widget text and take a look at your blog.